Title: Naming Rites
Author: Gary Boelhower
Release Date: May 16th 2017
Genre: Poetry
BLURB
Gary Boelhower’s third collection of poems explores the ways we are named and branded with multiple identities, a clay vessel molded and imprinted from the inside and the outside by those who know us or think they do, by wounds, worries, stones, and nicknames, by place and absence, by teachers and traitors. Boelhower dares to name the body’s blows and pleasures and how they are celebrated in solitude and connection. His language soars with ecstasy and burrows into hidden places in the soul. His lyrics tell how the world’s pain lodges in the cells and how the fragrance of summer stars opens an aperture to healing. Boelhower is winner of the Foley Prize from America and the Midwest Book Award for his second collection Marrow, Muscle, Flight.
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EXCERPT
CALL ME BY THAT NAME
Lay another log on the embers
as the evening drifts toward midnight
slow dancing in the dark shadows
of Leonard Cohen’s dirge
feathery snow mounding on the graveyard gate
on the church bells on the outstretched hands
of the crescent moon rocking ever so slowly
in the graceful galactic rhythm of the fire’s song
snap and flare of all things loosened and lost
winter moans in the stone cold bones
rock me now and turn me round
kiss me with your summer lips
waltz the winds of autumn till the bright colors
fall like stars and promises
pull me close to the drum of your heart
and call me by that name that answers the green
song of your need cries out in your dreams
call me by that name you learned
from the river’s rush and the storm’s bright lightning
say it now before I burn to ashes
and all we have is memory
lead me now by that name up the stairs
to the warm bed by the winter window
where we watch the words waltz white lace
through the dark sky falling as we are falling
through the long merciful silence
sing my name with your body burn it into my flesh
your lips brand the sweet wound of belonging.
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Author Bio
Gary Boelhower’s poetry has been published in many anthologies and journals. His second collection of poems published in 2011, Marrow, Muscle, Flight won the Midwest Book Award. He was awarded the Foley Prize in poetry from America magazine in 2012 and a career development grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in 2010. His recent nonfiction books include Choose Wisely: Practical Insights from Spiritual Traditions, and Mountain 10: Climbing the Labyrinth Within,(co-authored with Joe Miguez and Tricia Pearce). His third collection of poems, Naming Rites, was published in April by Holy Cow! Press. Gary teaches courses in spirituality, ethics and leadership at The College of St. Scholastica where he is a professor in the Theology and Religious Studies Department.
Reviews
Naming Rites is such a generous collection it offers both blessings and confessions, dirt and bread, miracles and explosions, cruelty and mercy, great blue herons who resemble monks and blue jays clowning around, a lover's tender touch and the horrors of the nightly news. In second grade, Gary Boelhower admits, he won 'the glow-in-the-dark statue of Mary,' and his religious drive, now mature, is still alive in these poems. They aim for (and often achieve) not just a personal record but transubstantiation, transforming experience into wisdom, fear into freedom, language into song. Naming Rites is the autobiography of a soul, reaching out beyond the boundaries of the self. Bart Sutter, author of Cow Calls in Dalarna and Chester Creek Ravine: Haiku
Thank you for particpating today xx
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